Bench Press Routine Tips: How To Increase Your Strength!

There are several things you can do to increase strength in your bench press routine, but here is one of the most simple things you can do:

Warm up correctly.

I don't mean just warming up before beginning your bench press routine, but warming up correctly all the way to your heavy sets of your bench press.

In my opinion, most people do not warm up correctly before beginning their heavy sets for their bench press routine.

This could have a significant and negative impact on their ability to lift maximum weight and overload the muscles sufficiently.

In fact, warming up the right way is one of the best things I've done in my bench press routine to increase my strength!

Why is increasing my bench press important to me?

Well, if you don't increase your weight and don't achieve proper overload, there will be no new muscle fiber stimulation and no new muscle growth for the chest.

So not only will a proper warm-up lessen your chances of becoming injured, it will help you increase strength on your bench press routine the very first day you put this principle into practice.

Just the other day, I witnessed someone do the following in their bench routine.

This person started with the bar, which in most gyms is 45 pounds. They busted out a quick, easy set of 10 reps. They then put on 45-pound plates (135 pounds) and did another set of 10.

Then they went up to 155 pounds and did another 10 reps. Here's where they're starting to go wrong. They're beginning to use way too much energy on these warm-ups.

They then did another set with 175 pounds for 10 more reps, then 200 for a set of 8 reps. So far, 5 sets and this person hasn't even started their "heavy and intense" sets yet! They've wasted time, energy, and intensity all before it really even counted.

On the 6th set, they noticed they were starting to tire quickly and could only handle 210 for 5 reps. So this is where they stop the bench press portion of their workout figuring that since they are fatigued, they have worked the muscles sufficiently.

After talking briefly with this person, I realized they had been at this weight and unable to break past this plateau for months. They just assumed it's where they were meant to be, that they couldn't get any stronger.

So I gave him some tips I used to increase my bench press routine.

The most important one was showing him how all of his warming up was wearing his strength down before he even got to the heavy sets of his bench!